This article was published in a week where the CEO of a major corporation admitted that he was completely wrong when he called concerns about his bank a "tempest in a teapot" just 4 weeks ago. He called his own company "sloppy" and "stupid" on national television.
And Ballmer is the worst CEO?
That despite the fact that Microsoft has had some awesome researchers and projects. They have by and large failed to bring any those tools and products to market (the kinect again being a notable exception).
All of this aside, Microsoft hasn't needed to innovate to the degree of the other big players for a while. Apple needed to innovate in order to secure some set of markets in order to survive. Google wants to innovate since it needs to gather more data to boost its ad business. Amazon wants to be the retailer for everything, and anyone selling anything else (e-books, music, movies - notably) cuts into their profits, so naturally they want to cut into those markets first. Microsoft... had Windows and Office, no real issues there until Apple started to edge in on the consumer market alongside non-PC devices. Even prior to that, Vista was an attempt at innovation that resulted in major screw-up for a ton of reasons, Windows 7 was the fix. Is it really any surprise we're only seeing real innovation (in Windows) now?
Then when they change something, the world goes into a shitstorm because it's different.
Many small businesses or mom & pop shops may have benefited from Windows+Office (specifically Excel, Word, and Access).
They can also purchase Office 365 and have tight integration with their one and only laptop to run their small business.
Sharepoint Online + Office 2010 are extremely powerful and beneficial for those that don't have their own IT department.
Sure, people can keep pointing out Salesforce, Basecamp, Highrise, some random CRM, some random Time & Expense stuff, shopify and so on but if you can get SP Online + Office 2010 for less than $25/month... that's hard to beat.
With that said, I think they are in for a vary long vary profitable decline but IMO so is Apple. Honestly, that's just what happens to large companies.
Sharepoint appears to be little more than a recreation of the Internet "in the small". First time I saw it I had the same thought as the last time I saw it: "WTF do we need _this_ for? We already share files; we already have FTP; we already have the Internet. WTF???"
Am I wrong about Sharepoint?
IMO, It is mostly just a mix of document repository (SVN) and custom website with permissions linked to active directory. However, organizations that can't roll their own intranet site worth a damm can often setup a SharePoint site that meets most of their needs. It supports customization through both plugins and custom code which is how MS get's their long term lock-in. For companies that can maintain say a talented Ruby on Rail's team there is little benefit but where the 'programming team' mostly slings excel macro's SharePoint can still get stuff done.
It's a typical buy vs build scenario. From my understanding, it's not difficult to integrate other enterprise apps to Sharepoint and make a dashboard.
You can probably do that with a bunch of Rails people but if the platform provides a decent "Portal" capabilities out of the box with minimum modification, why build from scratch?
The alternative is to install MediaWiki, WordPress, some sort of CMS perhaps, some sort of Portal (LifeRay?), some sort of document management system that supports versioning and decent web UI, integrate a bunch of services using custom web-app. That's a lot of infrastructure to deal with.
What do we need Excel for when we have perfectly good Perl and CSV files, you might as well ask...
Whether that is worth what Microsoft is selling Sharepoint for, well, that depends on the buyer. It also has the "nobody was fired for buying IBM" point (and Microsoft does have decent support).
I still haven't seen an Open Source Sharepoint "killer", though I might not know of it (I had good hopes for Alfresco).
So it's both FTP + SVN rolled into 1 feature set under SP umbrella.
Last I heard everyone was ditching it for Dynamics or anything-else-but-Sharepoint. I've never heard a good word said about Sharepoint. Though they seemed good at selling it. But it sounds to me that it invariably turned into a disaster.
I've always regarded Sharepoint as the new Lotus Notes, I'm happy to admit being wrong as my experience with it is a little tainted as I once worked for a company that Sharepoint was often suggested as an alternative to our product.
Dynamics is their attempt to join the ERP, CRM market and so far it's still a niche because they're targetting mid-size to large enterprise but the larger companies typically would either go with Oracle or SAP for ERP and something else for CRM.
In some respect, it is similar to LotusNotes in which you can write little apps backed by a data structure called SharePoint List (or SharePoint Document Library). So when I saw Trello, that's like Sharepoint List. Period. Sharepoint List is the core data structure, everything else seems to be derived from it.
The biggest difference is of course SP is web-based and tightly integrated with Microsoft other products: Office, InfoPath, .NET, Dynamics, Outlook, Exchange, AD, etc.
You can pretty much do/build almost everything (specifically Line of Business type of app) with SP (let's avoid technical discussion regarding whether an implementation of Time Tracking should be backed by RDBMS or not since these days people are using NoSQL anyway).
I have to say that it's not a bad product and there are use-cases where Sharepoint can fit.
Now make me stop defending these guys, I'm getting heartburn.
iTunes? The app store? Redesigning touchpad interactions for OSX?
It's an amazing achievement for apple, their api's and UI have matured quite impressively.
Clearly the industry has had that kind of growth in it, Apple did it. While MS is printing money like no one's business, the growth seems to have stopped where as they are a very rich company, a very talented company, with tons of resources, why haven't they grown?
It's hard to say Ballmer is bad, the numbers to speak for themselves. At the same time, if you maybe spun Xbox out and let it run as a small nimble company, maybe it'd be dominating, not carving off a third. Same with windows mobile and maybe even bing. There does seem to be some level of market share they can win with incredible expense (what they spend to win that market share has to be way more than the competition) and then the machinery of MS sort of bogs it down and it's a far smaller number than "Windows Everywhere" would have you believe they are capable of, it's not a leader in the market. You have to wonder about the future, I don't think they're in trouble but the tides can turn rapidly. What's the end game for Windows 8 tablet? 15% market share? 10%? What's acceptable? Moreover, it just seems like bad news is coming out about it and it's going up against iPad. Short of the DoJ leveling some sort of charges on Apple, I don't see windows8 tablets getting out of the blocks, let alone "Windows Everywhere." And then the flip side, what would they have Apple do? Allow IE on iPad? Is that going to change any thing?
Ballmer has done a lot to copy Apple in the past decade: Zune, Win7 UI, WinPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if they repackaged their old tablets in a sleeker Apple-esque style (which would be funny, because MS was genuinely first to that market) In general you get a very 'me too' feeling out their products in the past decade. (plus Azure and bing, which didnt copy Apple but other companies)
Ballmer deserves the crap he's gotten for his prior arrogance, but I have not seen that behavior in a long time. I have a hard time criticizing him for his lack of clairvoyance of Apple's success, but who else had it in 2007? Only Google comes to mind.
This story is just out there to get picked up by bloggers and hopefully go viral. I actually think the man deserves more respect.